Iowans enjoyed a front-row seat in the past year to watch a presidential race that already has become one for the record books.

The race to date “has been the most volatile for the GOP since the advent of polling,” the Gallup organization declared last week.

Since May, the lead in the Republican nomination race has changed seven times in Gallup polling. Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich have each led one or more polls.

And, of course, the actual voting produced plenty of drama, too. In unofficial results, Romney was declared the Iowa Republican caucuses winner by a whisker-thin margin of eight votes among 122,255 cast.

In raw votes, that’s the third-closest federal-level political contest in U.S. history, according to Washington Post research. It was edged by a two-vote difference in a 1974 New Hampshire Senate contest and a four-vote margin in a 1984 Indiana House race.

We can’t close the books yet on the 2012 caucuses; a two-week process to certify the results remains under way. So let’s revisit some of the twists and turns of this superlative-generating saga.

Here’s a look behind the scenes at a turning point for each campaign, reported by The Des Moines Register writers who covered each candidate.

BACHMANN CAMPAIGN STALLS AFTER STRAW POLL WIN

Aug. 16, 2011

“Before we get started, let’s all say happy birthday to Elvis Presley today!” Michele Bachmann yelled out to the crowd at a Spartanburg, S.C., restaurant on Tuesday, Aug. 16, three days after winning the Iowa straw poll.

Only it wasn’t the king of rock ’n’ roll’s birthday. It was the anniversary of his death.

It was an unfortunate gaffe that fed her reputation for verbal slips. But the bigger mistake, in the view of her Iowa advisers: She shouldn’t have been in South Carolina at all.

She had just won the straw poll. A full-page illustration of her triumphantly waving a copy of The Des Moines Register accompanied a lengthy profile in the New Yorker magazine.

And then she disappeared.

Bachmann followed up her Aug. 13 straw poll victory with a visit to a Black Hawk County Republican fundraiser the next day, but then jetted off to South Carolina and Florida. She didn’t return for 16 days.

Her Iowa advisers strenuously objected, arguing that she should take a “victory lap” around the state and cement her front-runner status.

“She won the straw poll,” said state Sen. Kent Sorenson, who served as Bachmann’s Iowa chairman until he abruptly left the campaign the week before the caucuses. “She should have planted a flag here in the state and basically owned it.”

Some of Bachmann’s national advisers agreed, but others did not. Bachmann apparently sided with the faction that viewed her campaign as a national effort, with plays in early-voting Southern states as well as first-in-the nation Iowa.

By the time she returned, on Aug. 31 for a Tea Party Express rally in Des Moines, her poll numbers were slumping and rival Rick Perry was surging. A week later, top advisers Ed Rollins and David Polyansky announced their exit.

Bachmann never reclaimed her momentum.

— Jason Noble

THIN LOSS IN STRAW POLL TURNS INTO A BENEFIT FOR PAUL

Aug. 13, 2011

First the results were 10 minutes late. Then 20, then 30. The call finally came around 5:30 p.m., 40 minutes after state GOP leaders had expected to share vote totals with Iowa straw poll candidates.

And, at first, the news was a bitter pill for Ron Paul staffers. The day’s victor, Michele Bachmann, had bested the Texas congressman by just 152 votes in Ames.

“I know there was a bit of disappointment because it was so close,” said Paul’s Iowa campaign chairman, Drew Ivers, who was among a small group of advisers awaiting the fateful call with Paul and his family. “Even Dr. Paul, I think, was a bit disappointed.”

Veteran Paul staffers had viewed his campaign as being on a roll. In his 2008 presidential run, his message of limiting government reach and spending had failed to catch fire, but it was gaining a more receptive audience amid the lingering pain of the Great Recession.

The day after the straw poll, to add insult to injury, news coverage focused almost entirely on Bachmann, with little mention of Paul’s close second-place finish.

But Paul’s loss eventually turned into a big gain, Ivers now acknowledges.

Two days after the straw poll, Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart took the media to task for treating Paul like “the 13th floor of a hotel.” In the weeks that followed, other media played catch-up with largely positive coverage.

“We got, in a sense, more coverage from the story of non-coverage than we would have gotten if we would have gotten first,” Ivers said.

Bachmann, in contrast, received the closer scrutiny that comes with being a front-runner. Paul benefited from “a little bit more time to build a base and not be hurt, or hit so much with hyper-criticism,” Ivers said.

Until December, when Paul topped some polls in Iowa, there was little “systematic investigation of what he’d said and done in the past, and in many ways, that was to (Paul’s) benefit,” said Dennis Goldford, a professor of politics at Drake University. “It allowed his campaign to organize pretty much under the radar, and by the caucuses, he was believed to have one of the best organizations out there.”

— Mary Stegmeir

UPTICK IN POLLS PUSHES SANTORUM’S MOMENTUM

Dec. 28, 2011

Rick Santorum was making several stops in Dubuque on Dec. 28, just six days before the caucuses, when reporters began checking their BlackBerrys and iPhones to read email alerts about a new Time/CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll.

Three weeks before, the same polling group had shown Santorum with 5 percent support. In this poll, he was at 16 percent, in third place.

Earlier in the day, after visiting with breakfast diners at Arianna’s Cafe in Independence, Santorum said he could feel his momentum building.

“I think we have a shot all the way to the top,” he told The Des Moines Register that morning. “This could be a late-breaking race, and the polls are probably not going to capture that.”

Actually, the polls did capture it, but not until the race’s homestretch. Nine polls conducted in the final 16 days showed Santorum at double digits for the first time — and climbing.

The Register’s final pre-caucus Iowa Poll didn’t detect major movement toward Santorum until the third of four days of interviewing, on Dec. 28, said J. Ann Selzer, who conducts the poll for the Register.

Poll results can be self-reinforcing, she said.

“Just as candidates get an Iowa bounce after the caucuses, so, very late in the game, they can get a bounce from a surprising poll result,” she said.

Santorum’s breakthrough in Iowa was the product of relentless campaigning, eventually totaling 105 days, which established a grass-roots organization, said Cody Brown, Santorum’s Iowa campaign manager.

Month after month, as his poll numbers remained mired in single digits, staffers stayed optimistic because of evidence of residual support they saw in phone bank data and other campaign information: Santorum was repeatedly listed as a second choice. His favorability ratings were high. Iowans simply needed to get a sense he could win, Brown said.

As other candidates faltered, he stood ready to pick up their supporters.

“People said, ‘I don’t know if he can win,’ but that just motivated us,” said Jake Braunger of Sioux City, Santorum’s field representative in northwest Iowa. “We were able to prove a lot of doubters wrong.”

— William Petroski

DEBATE LAPSE LEAVES NO TIME FOR A STRONG PERRY RECOVERY

Nov. 9, 2011

Bob Haus, Iowa co-chairman of Rick Perry’s campaign, was at home with his family on Nov. 9, watching the Republican candidates as they debated in Rochester, Mich.

Perry had entered the race later than any other candidate, on Aug. 13, yet shot to the top of national and Iowa polls. He hadn’t helped himself, though, in five debates through September and October. He conveyed little energy and was hit hard by rivals for calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” and for signing a law granting in-state college tuition to illegal immigrants who graduate from Texas high schools.

This night, however, Haus thought Perry was doing better. Then Haus stepped out of the room.

“I walked back in, and my wife was like, ‘He just had a bad moment,’ ” Haus said.

It was worse than bad. In an excruciating 50-second span, Perry couldn’t come up with the third of three departments he has pledged to eliminate. He named commerce and education, but blanked on energy. “The third one I can’t,” he said. “Oops.”

Perry was quickly scheduled to appear on a slew of shows the next day to do damage control. His national staff enlisted Haus and his team to call county chairs who were supporting Perry, to reassure them that their candidate was still viable.

Matt Whitaker, Haus’ co-chairman and a former University of Iowa football player, made some of the calls.

“I talked about football analogies, about it being early in the game and that missteps are made,” he said. “I’ve dropped passes in my career. I’ve fumbled balls in my career, but we still came back and won the game.”

Perry’s support, by then in single digits in Iowa polls, would eventually tick up to low double digits. But he never came close to the front-runner status he once enjoyed.

— Josh Hafner

NEGATIVE TV AD BEGINS A BARRAGE AGAINST GINGRICH

Dec. 7, 2011

The first ad in Iowa attacking Newt Gingrich was done entirely in black and white. A video clip showed Gingrich railing against “the politicians who profited” from an environment of their own creation.

Then came prominent conservative voices attacking him for pocketing $1.6 million while consulting for financially troubled mortgage giant Freddie Mac. The ad also dinged a think tank he founded for collecting $37 million from health care companies while he supported a mandate that everyone buy health insurance.

As martial music pulsed in the background, Gingrich was accused of being a Washington insider who was guilty of “serial hypocrisy.” Ron Paul paid for the ads, which hit about three weeks after Gingrich first topped polls in Iowa and looked as if he might stay there.

Paul poured roughly $1.37 million into Iowa TV ads in December alone, many of them targeting Gingrich.

The next day, Dec. 8, Restore Our Future, a super political action committee that supports former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, announced it would spend $3.1 million on TV and radio before the Jan. 3 caucuses. Its first ad mocked President Barack Obama, but the group soon directed its fire at Gingrich. A so-called super PAC cannot coordinate its activities with a presidential campaign, but speaking Dec. 20 in Ottumwa, a clearly frustrated Gingrich nonetheless urged Romney to denounce the group.

“It’s truly frustrating to be an honest person trying to run a complicated campaign on the nation’s issues and have these guys go out and hire people who just write lies and then run the lies and say, ‘Oh, gee, I didn’t mean to do that.’ Baloney,” Gingrich said.

As the pounding continued, Gingrich’s poll numbers sank.

Gingrich expected criticism, particularly as his poll standings improved, said Katie Koberg, an Iowa campaign staffer. He had insisted he would run a positive campaign, but later said he should have been more aggressive earlier in countering the negative ads.

“We always knew that they would be damaging, but it was a massive barrage,” Koberg said.

— Jason Clayworth

ACCUSATION OF AFFAIR BECOMES FINAL STRAW FOR CAIN

Nov. 28, 2011

In an investigative report aired by Atlanta’s Fox 5 television station, Georgia businesswoman Ginger White, dressed in a black dress and white necklace, stated that she’d had a 13-year affair with Herman Cain.

“It wasn’t complicated,” she said. “And I was aware that he was married.”

But for Cain’s Iowa supporters, the situation was complicated. White was one woman too many with sex-related accusations. In earlier weeks, news had come to light of four other women who had made sexual-harassment allegations against Cain, dating to the 1990s. That revelation initially boosted Cain’s poll numbers, as supporters accused the media, Democrats and others of falsely targeting their man.

“We make mistakes. It doesn’t bug me. We had Clinton, right?” said Donna Riley of Logan.

Cain also stumbled with a rambling non-answer about his views on Libya during a Nov. 14 editorial board meeting with a Wisconsin newspaper. That fueled questions about his knowledge of foreign policy.

Then White came forward, with phone records verifying back-and-forth communications between her and Cain. One-time Iowa supporters began to question not only Cain’s ethics, but his viability.

“It is forcing me to question whether he’s electable. I’m not going to waste my vote,” said Michele Gates of West Des Moines.

By the time Cain suspended his campaign on Dec. 3, his support had plunged from 23 percent to 8 percent in the Register’s Iowa Poll.

That freed his supporters to latch onto other candidates, factoring into the surges of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.

— Josh Hafner

ROMNEY CAMPAIGN SETS QUIET IOWA STRATEGY

Jan. 4, 2011

Exactly a year before a caucus winner would be announced, Rich Beeson, Mitt Romney’s national campaign director, came to Des Moines to review a plan to run a credible, lean Iowa campaign.

Romney wanted to avoid investing the millions of dollars and months of time he spent here the last cycle, which led to a disappointing second place. Some experts predicted he would skip the state and focus on New Hampshire. David Kochel, a Des Moines consultant who had worked for Romney before, believed he could make a solid Iowa showing with just a handful of paid staff members and no ads until the end.

Kochel had sent Beeson a six- or seven-page memo outlining the plan. At the top, he summarized its objectives: “1) Keep expectations in check throughout 2011. 2) Shore up past support. 3) Beat Iowa expectations on caucus night.”

Kochel swears now that campaign leaders never focused on winning Iowa.

“I always thought it was possible,” he said last week. “I never thought it was necessary.”

The goal was simply to do well enough to have some momentum going into New Hampshire, where the former Massachusetts governor would be heavily favored.

Romney, of course, was declared the winner on caucus night. Many observers thought the turning point happened in late December, when he finally spent serious time campaigning here. Kochel disagrees. He says Romney’s bus tour helped build momentum, but the candidate’s victory was mainly due to months of targeted spadework.

The campaign used sophisticated data-mining programs to identify people who had backed Romney in the 2008 campaign or who would be most likely to do so now. It contacted them by mail and phone, looking for supporters and volunteers. Tens of thousands of those voters received messages inviting them to participate in “tele-town halls,” in which callers could ask questions of Romney or prominent supporters, such as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

“That helped us preserve people’s interest at a time when the other candidates were here campaigning on the ground day after day after day, and we weren’t,” Kochel said.